daniel chigunwe
NAIROBI. – The 15-year-old star of a film about a schoolgirl forced to marry an older man is evangelical about her role − despite the fact that her community in north-western Kenya might see it as a betrayal and treat her as an outcast.
“I want the movie to spark conversations about this topic, because it’s really not something people want to talk about,” Michelle Lemuya Ikeny tells the BBC.
She plays 13-year-old Nawi, the eponymous heroine of the coming-of-age film set in Turkana county, a rural area which borders Uganda and where the UN says one in four girls are married before they are 18.
Michelle, who grew up in Turkana where the film was shot, kept these girls in mind when portraying Nawi’s emotions − a performance that won her an Africa Movie Academy Award for best promising actor last November.
Like all the local children who star in the film, she had never acted before. When she signed up for it, she thought she would just be appearing in a school drama.
“It has changed my life, but I don’t want it to change my personality,” the teenager says.
In the film, just after 13-year-old Nawi finds out that her exam results are top in the county, she hears that her father is selling her to a wealthy man named Shadrack in exchange for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats”.
Instead of accepting her fate, Nawi smears blood on her legs on her wedding night to fake a period and then runs away to pursue her dream of going to high school in the capital, Nairobi.
Her father and Shadrack are furious and try to follow her, but she manages to outsmart them with the help of her brother.
However, she than goes back home to Turkana to bravely confront them when she finds out that her new baby sister has been promised to Shadrack as a replacement bride.
There are many scenes which highlight how widespread child marriage is − and how it is accepted despite being against the law. According to Kenya’s 2014 Marriage Act, a person must be 18 years of age to marry.
In one scene, when Nawi’s classmate Zawari does not show up to the end-of year exam, the boys in the class joke that she is “busy making babies”.
The story was written by Milcah Cherotich, who won a writing competition launched by the German-Kenyan non-governmental organisation Learning Lions.
Cherotich says her own childhood was the inspiration for her first feature film script as she grew up Turkana. – BBC
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter